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Architecture is a reflection of the ideals that a culture holds in high esteem. No longer a church, no longer the civic or political institution, we now triumphantly exalt the values of financial dominance in our collection of towering sparkled jewels. Through our imposing and soulless buildings, we have made the money makers and literally the building makers our leaders, those that reflect the symbols of our baser desires to conquer one another. How far removed from the soul and soil we have become, dreaming each of dominating the other and mastering the skies. Oh, but how far we will have to fall to find our grounding again some day.

I live in a neighborhood where a statue of Charles Dickens presides over the center of town and references the author’s exaltation of the innocence and virtue of children. Art dominates the town through our victorian-style residences, vibrant bodegas, restaurants, places of worship, music, and people. Our residents hail from a wide array of ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. This is the architectural ideal I wish to pursue, a neighborhood that draws people together to hash out our differences and promotes familiarity and tolerance. Our architecture should be exalting the community rather than the domineers. We should be expelling the false premise of winners and losers or good and evil peoples and break bread together on the ground floor where we all belong.

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I witnessed three thriving local businesses shutter their doors in my community this past year. As a business owner myself, I believe there were some fundamental missteps common to each of these organizations worth highlighting.

Part 1 (of 3): The Coffee Shop

First, let me note that my neighborhood has no shortage of coffee shops. You can throw a ringed frisbee in any direction and more than likely lasso a latte.

Coffee shops are a sign of a healthy community. They bring people together from disparate backgrounds and are a catalyst for conversation. They are a bridge for understanding and familiarity in an increasingly polarized society. It is no accident that coffee houses were instrumental during the European enlightenment period to fuel innovation and progress by introducing the regular injection of caffeine into mixed society, brewing up and distributing ideas.

A little while back, I had an unfortunate encounter with the staff and management of the coffee shop directly adjacent to my home. The back wall of the shop serves as one of the four sides of my mini back yard in the city. Against that back wall is our family garden with flowers, vegetables, and the like where our three young children and a hoard of squirrels routinely play.

One spring afternoon, the coffee shop management had scheduled the cable company to run a new Internet line. They needed access to our backyard for the installation. I was working from my home office that day and heard shouting outside. I followed the noise and discovered the barista from the coffee shop in my backyard screaming expletives and racial insults at my wife and children. A bit stunned, I sent the family inside and tried to calm the situation and understand the cause for these hysterics.

Apparently the barista had wanted to run a cable out of the back wall of the shop and through our garden for their new Internet setup. My wife had asked if they could perhaps run the line from the side wall instead to avoid tangling the garden with less than aesthetically pleasing cable wires. I agreed this was a fairly reasonable request and asked if we could discuss it with the cable installation technician. The barista declined and carried on with her expletives and racially-charged tirade, this time directed at me. I told her I was sorry she felt this way and asked her to focus the conversation on the cable line and avoid the shouting and name calling. I was genuinely concerned for her mental health, as there was no apparent provocation for her tantrum.

I eventually asked her politely to leave as she stood shouting at me on our front sidewalk. The cable technician arrived shortly thereafter and readily agreed that installation of the cable on the side wall was easily done and no inconvenience for any party.

I dismissed the barista’s behavior as erratic and unfortunate, but felt obligated to inform the coffee house owner of the incident, who was not on site at the time. I wrote up a short summary email and said I would stop over to discuss and clear up the matter. My intent for this discussion was not to punish the employee or perform any self-righteous grandstanding, but instead to help a fellow business owner understand that there was a behavior and issue that may undermine the success of her business and relationship with the community.

When I arrived the next day to speak with the owner, she greeted me with a scowl and said she had so spoken with the barista and saw no error on her part. I elaborated politely that her unprovoked employee had spat expletives at my family and children over a trifle. She claimed that the barista is “very passionate about racial issues” and told me to leave. Now reader, you must perhaps be thinking that there is some other side to this story that I have glossed over, some incendiary comment or body language from myself or my wife that must have triggered such a reaction; I can assure there was no such exchange. I believe the woman to be mentally unstable and hope she finds better ways to cope wherever she may be today.

I decided to frequent other neighborhood coffee houses, of course, from that point forward. A few weeks later I walked by the old shop and observed the door swinging open and two men exiting in haste while being screamed at by the same barista for being presumed to have voted for the wrong presidential candidate.

This issue of course for the business has much less to do with the employee’s behavior than it does with the owner’s response. I would have been satisfied with an apology and an acknowledgment that the owner had spoken with the employee and explained that this behavior was inappropriate, or just some thanks for having made her aware of the situation at a minimum. The owner was not a resident of our local community and I think she missed an opportunity here to build a relationship despite the difficult context.

This type of behavior and management insensitivity on the aggregate can create a rift with the community that I think is very difficult to repair. Some months later, perhaps a year or so, I learned that the owner had shut down the business and the angry barista had moved on along with the rest of the staff. A new owner purchased the space and hired a new crew.

I am once again frequenting the coffee shop with my children, although I often have to respond to their questions about why mommy and daddy were called those nasty things, what they meant, and what we did wrong. The silver lining is the opportunity this created for me to have meaningful discussions with my children about important social issues that they will eventually need to grapple with, though I would have preferred to have those conversations on quite different terms.

All businesses will inevitably encounter adversity. Employees will make mistakes, management and owners (myself very much included) will have errors in judgment from time to time. The difference for successful businesses is the response that they make to those circumstances and their ability to address customer and community feedback in a measured and constructive way.

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I was returning from a grocery shopping trip with my six year old daughter and three year old son in the car. My wife was in the hospital recovering after giving birth to our third child the day before. The kids were both excited and anxious about this big change and buzzing around like bees for attention. I was short on sleep and feeling accomplished at having completed a grocery trip without any major meltdowns by any of us.

I parallel parked the car about a block away from our home in the city. I unloaded the groceries and the children from the trunk (they had just discovered the new third row seating option after I installed the new baby’s car seat and decided that climbing out of the trunk was a much more exciting way to exit the vehicle).

An old woman stepped off her porch and approached us as I gathered my various bundles. With a smile, she pointed to the car behind mine and told me at length that the sequence of parked vehicles had gotten out of whack this week because the driver of the car behind mine had pulled up a little too far. Holding my grocery bags and with kids doing whirling dervishes around my legs, I commiserated that we live a block down the road and have a similar situation sometimes in front of our home.

Imagining that our pleasant neighborly exchange had come to a close, I shut the trunk and started down the sidewalk with my crew. She stopped me and continued her story about the devastating impact that one misaligned car can have for sometimes a whole week. She went on about how drivers do not understand the nuances of the white line she had painted near the curb at the precise spot where the bumper of the first car on the block should always begin.

After agreeing that the situation was indeed an unfortunate circumstance, I politely mentioned that our family had just had a newborn child yesterday and were looking forward to getting home to prepare for mommy and baby’s arrival later that afternoon, hoping she would get the hint that we really should be on our way and had some more pressing matters to attend to.

The old woman smiled again, and continued to explain to me her dismay about the parking spots and how she had been waiting for the car on the end of the block to leave so she could park her own car at just the right position to set the block aright again.

I realized that my sleep deprivation may have been impacting my critical thinking and I began to suspect that perhaps I was somehow contributing to the parking debacle in the placement of my own car, which could explain her detaining me further. I asked her if my parking location was causing a problem and said I would gladly move my car if needed. She paused for a moment and told me that no, in fact, my car was parked in the perfect spot to support the correct parking alignment setup. I smiled and told her to have a nice day and hurried away before she could progress the conversation any further.

We all have issues that cause us personal anxiety and grief. I think it’s important to be mindful in our conversations that our audience in all likelihood has their own challenges and concerns, some more weighty than others. I know I have been guilty of this as well at times when I catch myself complaining about trivial matters that are not worth griping about compared with the hardships that so many others are grappling with.

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There is an unfortunate multitude of ready answers available for life’s toughest questions. We must be skeptical of any easy answer to a difficult question. We should begin by rejecting simple and familiar answers, plummet headlong into the painful sting of ignorance, and hope to begin to string together bits of disparate intelligence that might one day approximate the truth.